Indie

>gyaru
>nakadashi
>vanilla/happy sex

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>"souls like combat"

THIS WTF

Problem is "pixel art" covers a fuckton of things and sadly mostly encompasses inept "artists" who think their 8bit vomit is good.

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Those character sprites don't entirely mix with the background either to be honest. The other examples in the steam page also have nice backgrounds but that character sprites always look a bit odd

I refunded Monolith because its literally a copypaste formula of dozens of other similar titles.

>Explore random floor of squares arranged in a grid
>Collect health upgrades, keys, and money
>Spend money at shop for upgrades
>Spend max health on slightly stronger upgrades
>Fall "downward" into a new random floor where you can't return to spend it

You wanna know what other games do this exact fucking formula?

>Enter the Gungeon
>Starward Rogue (Literally Monolith but better)
>Manaya (Actual trash)
>Planetary Dustoff (Gungeon but without room transitions)
>Rush Rover
>Spaceship Looter (Probably the worst one here but its 99 cents right now)
It's all the same fucking game.

>inept "artists" who think their 8bit vomit is good.
there's nothing worse than an artist who remembered show 8bit and 16bit actually looked. your crt tv played a major role in that.

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>that weird time where people wanted Souls combat in everything
For me metroidvania is just a big red flag overall, like I don't get it is an adventure game? an action one? It's like the indie equivalent of AAA open world shit.

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Monolith is the only one the functions as an actually decent bullet hell, though. Every other Psuedo-Bullet-Hell rougelite like it gives you some retard-tier hitbox or does some fucking awful depth nonsense.

>rogue-like elements

It's why we have the roguelite distinction from actual roguelikes.

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>like I don't get it is an adventure game? an action one?
Both.
Trouble with indie Metroidvanias is that they're so fucking in love with either Super Metroid or Castlevania, and never remotely manage to surpass either.
When indies normally get around not being able to compete with teams of professionals by trying something new.

>metroidvania
I just read it as "action game with a map that has backtracking" at this point, that being said, I recently started playing Momodora and it's pretty fun so far

Sweet fucking based

Barely. Starward Rogue has a pretty fair setup but the rest are pretty bad, even Gungeon. Plus that's just the ones that follow the top-down shooter style of play.

Check out Downwell, it's literally the exact same thing as all the ones I described above except its a platformer. Even got the monochrome aesthetic of Monolith.
store.steampowered.com/app/360740/Downwell/

Japs actually have a way better term for it that's something along the lines of "Progression-based exploration game".

I have Downwell. Monolith has far more content. That being said, if you didn't enjoy Monolith because you felt it was too derivative, you might want to look into the $7 DLC they've been posting development videos for on twitter. It's adding a lot of new shit.
twitter.com/team_d13/status/1129481868523524097?s=19
twitter.com/team_d13/status/1088168767190900736?s=19

I'm so sick of "Souls-like combat".

It made it impossible for me to enjoy Outward, despite me really liking the concept of that game. But goddamn the combat is shit.

I didn't enjoy monolith because the aesthetic of it wasn't enough to justify the same game i've played 3 other times before. It's decent if it's the only one you've played but after getting Gungeon first because Yea Forums wouldn't shut up about it and barely enjoying it, got Starward Rogue on recommendation and it was fairly nice, then got Monolith because someone in another thread a few months ago was freaking out about how good it was so I figure yeah sure I like stgs.
Fuck me I can only play the same damn game so many times.

Well that's decent, even if it probably includes games like Gothic under its wing. Metroidvania rolls off the tongue but it's prone to misinterpretation, especially since it's meant to specifically refer to what's now called Igavanias instead of "either Metroid or Castlevania inspired".

pixel art should have naturally evolved into high definition 2d art, but that requires talent.

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>Fuck me I can only play the same damn game so many times.
Oh, that's completely understandable. Even if Monolith is really solid, I would also have probably hated it if I had played it after beating like three other similar games back-to-back.
If you like STGs, though, I'd like to suggest Zero Ranger.

People like the look of pixel art, you retard. That's like saying that "stylization should have naturally evolved into realism".

You best not be fooling me into another one of these.

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That requires a team. Indie, in the "garage developer" sense of the term, is always going to have a hard cap in production values when the manhours needed to produce something exceed the capacity available of 1 or 2 people.

Nah, Zero Ranger's just a regular STG, no Rouge Bullshit or anything.

To be fair Vanillaware puts something like 80% of their game budget to art. Darkest Dungeon is also an example of what you're talking about.

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And a budget, there's a point in 2D when you end up doing the job of an animation studio and most amateur stuff can't afford it.

Is this just the "indie game aesthetics" thread now?
Because this fucking trailer gets my dick rock hard.
twitter.com/crossniq/status/1123017033526980610?s=19

>That's like saying that "stylization should have naturally evolved into realism".
not really considering we're just talking about advancement of technology here. I'd say 3d killed them both, though.

only if they had a unique art style
the thing with indie games is that they all copy eachother
seeing all that shit over and over again is vomit inducing

Salt and Sanctuary is pretty good mate

Name 1 game.

Nice, reminds me of GBA/DS era of jap games.

...

Not really, high definition 2D and Pixel Art have different aesthetics.

But there's plenty of unique-looking indie games out there.
>ESA's ultra-lowres look to make your character look as tiny as possible
>zero ranger's GREEN/ORANGE ONLY, FINAL DESTINATION color palette
>Crosscode's cross between early-mid 2000s MMO UI and SNES-era ARPGs
>Kero Blaster's solid, defined colors
>Shovel Knight's NES mimicry
>Lethal League Blaze's heavy cel-shading and bright colors
>Lovely Planet's fullbright solid colors and simple models for quick identification during speed challenges
I could go on for ages.

>follow Bourassa on twitter hoping for some sick DD style art
>he spends all his time drawing batman and shitting up my feed with retweets of capeshit

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Nah, Pixel Art looks neat where 2D looks too soft.

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maybe if right didn't purposefully draw the hair wrong it wouldn't look too soft

Why does she squat so hard in the pixel art?

But people get whiny when you point this out. OP is probably one of them too, which makes things worse.

There's nothing wrong with these things, you're just burnt out of them. Being a new indie dev is fucking hard; you don't have a lot of cash or experience to create something grand, so you gotta start small.

And it holds up. Roguelites are trash and just try to use procgen to avoid making levels, with the minimal amount of mechanical complexity, environmental interaction, or harsh, survival elements that keep roguelikes engaging.

> Roguelites are trash and just try to use procgen to avoid making levels
Ideally this is just a sign of a shit developer. ProcGen still needs some semblance of balance to keep things consistent enough for a player's skill to matter more than RNG.

>then got Monolith because someone in another thread a few months ago was freaking out about how good it was so I figure yeah sure I like stgs.

Monolith was made by guys from /agdg/, so it was probably a shill. It's a good game though.

I like roguelike elements in my games because they tend to raise the stakes, but some devs are really just using them as a progression crutch or to make a roguelike accessible to retards.

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not every game is based breath of fire 4, in fact most indie shit "pixel art" is just low effort garbage

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Yes, and many 3d games reuse assets.
Games don't have infinite budgets for that kind of animation, especially not indies.
We've actually SEEN what happens when indie devs put a large level of focus on artwork: The game takes >10 years to make and is quickly forgotten because thousands of games are coming out daily.

You graphics whores are awful and I wish people would stop listening to you.

2D can be made so it doesn't look soft, like at all just like pixel art can be soft too. There's always something appealing about unnecessarily detailed pixel art though, there's something very "human" about it despite being inherently digital because there are no shortcuts to good pixel art.

Why isn't this game out on PC yet?

no one tells indie devs to attempt to make games that look BoF4 tier, its their own choice. The issue is that they make the game 5 minutes long after 9 years. Even if you have all your budget thrown into artwork, you'd still think they could add more than 5 levels by reusing some assets here or there. Katana zero is a good example of this honestly.

Worked pretty good for dead cells.

Low effort bullshit, I know.

>462607513

>The issue is that they make the game 5 minutes long
If Owlboy was only 5 minutes long, it would be a better game.

HD 2D has a lot of bothersome tweening. Not every game can be Warioland Shake-it.

...

>Games don't have infinite budgets for that kind of animation
Budget was never the reason japs stopped using that kind of sprite work, and there are alternatives to pixel art that look good and are cheap but for some reason many indie games would rather appeal to nostalgia.

What are they?

By that logic, all 2D games should've evolved into 3D games. Don't be fucking retarded.

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>Long as it's not hyper low-res, that Sword and Sworcery inspired trash.

Characters' legs are an easy tell. If they are one pixel wide, it's shit.

Sometime art style is just art style. Early Battle Brothers concept looked silly as fuck, for example.

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very few pixel artists are this talented, in fact most talent has nothing on the people working in vidya in the 90s and early 2000s. BoF4 is now hailed as one of the most beautiful games ever made and at the time it almost seemed par for the course, I didn't even truly appreciate it until over a decade later

Pic related is alright

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>open world
>survival
>crafting

Hm, I stand corrected.

I think people just tend to forget it was made by a team of professionals with then actual technology. Giving someone access to RPG Maker would basically give you the tools to accomplish the same today, but you're not a professional artist nor do you have a team of coders working on the game, for example.

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kizumono good

early 80s vector games, low poly from the first half of the 90s, not hard to animate and looks as good (mostly better) as """8-bit""" pixel vomit.

Indies tried that, it was pretty underwhelming.

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What happened is that pixel art of that quality became too labor intensive, it generally wasn't worth the cost in comparison to shitting out 3D games with models you could simply pose. It also didn't help that around the early to mid 2000s is when the share holders started to realize video games were big fucking business and started meddling and ruining the industry.

Everyone's favorite composer Tim Follin, who wasn't overly fond of video games himself of course, but said he ultimately left the industry because the meddling of the share holders was the "death of creativity" and he said this in like 2002 or something. People still claim its just nostalgia though..

They're all "roguelites" what do you expect?

That looks pretty cool actually.

Environmental Station Alpha did it well, but only because the character is incredibly tiny.

Works in stills.

Funny thing about 3D, speaking as a 3D fag, is that low-poly isn't any easier to UV map, rig or animate than mid-poly. Unlike 2D animation where every detail you add is another step through the bowels of hell in keeping a nice, clean FBF animation going, a fucked rig is going to warp with 200 faces or 2000.

But yeah, there's been a fair few indie 3D games. You've got stuff like SkyLens for your japs and My Time in Portia for your west and everything inbetween.
It's not better or worse than 2D, just different. Which the market benefits from, if everything isn't being hyper-derivative.

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>thread complaining about steam tags
>get a few neat game recommendations out of it
Thanks anons

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